Nature

March 20, 2014

Happy Spring, everyone! Did you check out the Google doodle? If not, go have a look. I'll wait.

As I was walking up the hill after dropping Sylvie off at preschool this morning, I noticed it felt a little warmer than usual, which isn't difficult when the "usual" has been -10 degrees Celsius, and commented to the dad walking beside me, "You can feel spring in the air."

He responded in a voice more fit for a charismatic church than polite chitchat, a kind of joyous bellow: "It's HERE! I can FEEL it!"

I almost shouted " Hallelujah! Amen, brother!" and briefly considered dropping to my knees in the mud but figured that might be going a bit far, so I smiled and got in my car. When I turned it on, Vivaldi's "Spring" was playing on the radio. So all in all, it was a nice start to the day.

October 18, 2013

Why, what is that, hanging above the mantle at legendary Milford House? Can it be?

Why, yes, it is. It is the infamous, elusive, antlered hoof! A beast hitherto considered fanastical, like the unicorn. Those antlers must be as sensitive as the whiskers of a cat, or the antennae of an insect, because they have to perform the functions of eyes, nose, and tongue. Or do you think that this unusual creature actually does have a more usual sort of head, and each of its hooves has a pair of antlers attached to it? If so, the beast must have a very broad stance. It is a mystery.

October 10, 2012

We went away for a few days over this Thanksgiving weekend to a cottage in the woods. We took along these small white pumpkins, some glue, and golden glitter to make this little glitter pumpkin project. (I was trying to think of things to keep the kids busy since there was no television or internet where we were going.)All you do is paint the tops of the pumpkins with ordinary school glue and then sprinkle glitter all over them. It's very easy, even for someone Sylvie's age. Luke enjoyed it, too.

It kept them busy for all of five minutes! (The glitter is very glamping, don't you think?)

August 02, 2012

We spent the weekend on the other side of the province. One of our stops was a tiny village on the Bay of Fundy called Harbourville, pop. 100 , where we happened upon this crooked house, which you can rent for a vacation stay. We were going to eat at the Schnitzelhaus but it was closed the evening we were there.

Harbourville is really gorgeous and it's difficult to do the place justice in photos. It's the kind of place where you have to stand and slowly turn round in a circle in order to take it all in. And then you walk a little way and stop and do the spin again.

We arrived at low ride, which is why those two boats are sitting way down there on the ground. Just six hours later they would be floating above the water mark, as the Bay of Fundy has the highest tides in the world. We will definitely go back for to stay for a night or two, so we can explore the beaches, caves, and cliffs more fully and witness the dramatic change in the water level firsthand.

July 16, 2012

A hot-air balloonist in England recently discovered this meadow in the shape of a heart tucked away inside a stand of thousands of oak trees. Turns out it was made, secretly, by farmer Winston Howes, in memory of his wife Janet, who died of heart failure at age 50, in 1995. From The Daily Mail:

Mr Howes, 70, said yesterday: ‘I came up with the idea of creating a heart in the clearing of the field after Janet died.

‘I thought it was a great idea – it was a flash of inspiration – and I planted several thousand oak trees. Once it was completed we put a seat in the field, overlooking the hill near where she used to live.

‘I sometimes go down there, just to sit and think about things. It is a lovely and lasting tribute to her which will be here for years.’

He created the wood next to his farmhouse in the months after her death, marking out the massive heart shape with a large hedge.

The entrance to the secret heart is accessible only from a track leading up to its tip.

Mr Howes added: ‘We got people in especially to do it – there are several thousand trees.

‘We planted large oak trees around the edge of the heart then decided to put a hedge around it too. The heart points towards Wotton Hill, where Janet is from. We plant daffodils in the middle that come up in the spring – it looks great. I go out there from time to time and sit in the seat I created.’

May 07, 2012

Give a boy a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a boy to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Give your sister a fish and freak her out with the glare of its glassy dead eyes. Somebody better teach your mother how to prepare and cook a fish from scratch if you keep this up, kid. (I am quite impressed -- I do not think I have ever caught a fish.)

April 30, 2012

There are a couple of trees in our yard just crying out for this Fairy Door. You can buy the accessories -- the little windows with the flower boxes and the lantern, which LIGHTS UP AT DUSK AND TURNS OFF AT DAWN -- but I'm wondering if they're overkill. I should've ordered this for Easter but I didn't and now May Day is tomorrow. Perhaps for the summer solstice? (Also, don't you think "Fairy Door" would be the perfect name for a gay bar?)

April 16, 2012

On Sunday we went looking for mayflowers. They're called mayflowers but they come out in April here in Nova Scotia, at the tail end of winter. Their tiny pink and white blossoms, so delicate in comparison to the thick hairy brown stems and broad rusty leaves that protect them, smell heavenly -- sweet, wild and, beyond that, indescribable. Finding them -- and you can only find them in the wild -- means that it is definitely spring.

Luke, unconvinced that mayflowering would be very exciting, brought his Lego Ninjago sword, which he used to fight off a number of invisible monster skeletons he happened upon. He also explained to me, as I peered into the underbrush looking in vain for tiny pink and white buds, that just the sight of his sword would be sure to terrify any bears we might stumble across, as surely at least a few of their ancestors must have been killed by swords. I nodded and kept looking for mayflowers, wondering how the bears might've communicated this ancestral fear of swords to their children. Sylvie, pushed along in her stroller by her father, bounced over tree roots and babbled about owls.

After some fruitless searching, we came out onto the hiking trail that has been made out of a defunct railway line. Luke and Vivi, who by now had tumbled out of her stroller, started to lag behind and to complain. Grampa's sharp eyes managed to discover three tiny unopened mayflower buds on the side of the trail. "Maybe it's still too early," I said and suggested that we make a quick detour to the nearby town graveyard, to see the children's grandmother's grave, before going on to the playground.

Luke's grandfather's name and birthdate are inscribed to the left of his grandmother's but of course, as Grampa is still with us, there is only a smooth empty space where the date of his death would go. "Who knows? Who knows? Who knows?" said Luke cheerfully, as he pointed one by one at the blanks where the month, day, and year will be.

Vivi caught sight of a small gravestone carved in the shape of a teddy bear. She ran off toward it. I went after her, to make sure she didn't take any of the flowers away. It was the grave of an 8-month-old baby. "We love you, silly bird" was inscribed along the bottom. Sylvie giggled and stumbled away in her bumble bee boots. I followed her, looking down at my feet, my eyes suddenly filled with sunlight and tears. And there, in the dead brown grass all around the children's grandmother's grave, were dozens of mayflowers.

March 31, 2012

Traditional Maxim: If March comes in like a lion, it'll go out like a lamb. If it comes in like a lamb, it'll go out like a lion.

Update: If March comes in like a lion, it'll suddenly turn into a lizard, then briefly into a Labrador retriever, then back again into a lizard before it goes back out again like a lion. If March comes in like a lamb, it'll be served with mint sauce.

March 16, 2012

This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone is a memoir by Melissa Coleman that got a lot of attention last year when it first came out. Coleman's parents, Eliot and Sue, were among the first back-to-the-landers of the late 60s and 70s. They moved to a plot of land in rural Maine that adjoined the farm of Helen and Scott Nearing, the couple who wrote Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World, which is the book credited with inspiring the movement. Eliot and Sue built their own home, grew their own food, and Sue gave birth to two little girls while they did it. It sounds Edenic, particularly for children, and partly, it was. (This NYT review of the book does a good job of describing the basic events of This Life is In Your Hands and also the sort of see-sawing the book does between the poetry of the family's life, rooted as it was in nature, and an increasing sense of ominousness.)

It's easy for people who have never attempted to be self-sufficient through farming to romanticize the idea (witness the current resurgence of what Emily Matchar calls the New Domesticity, which admittedly doesn't seem as hard-core a movement) but the fact is that it makes for a very hard life. (I am guilty of romanticizing it myself -- in high school I gave a speech on my version of "the good life" in which I would retreat with my little family to a cabin in the woods, where I would homeschool my children and we would all survive, I guess, on nuts and berries.) Coleman, who is now a nationally recognized expert on organic gardening, actually had a thyroid disorder, largely untreated, that spurred him on to ceaseless physical labour. And if I were going to try to accomplish what he did, I think I'd want one, too. From Melissa Coleman's descriptions of her mother, Sue, it seems to me that she suffered terribly from post-partum depression and that this was horribly compounded by the relentless, back-breaking work that homesteading actually entailed, not to mention possible malnutrition.

Now here is where the spoiler comes in. Consider yourself warned. One day, busy preparing a feast for some visitors (as if she doesn't have enough to do), Sue shoos Melissa's little sister Heidi, who is around three at the time I think, out of the cabin, telling her to go float her toy boat on the pond. Heidi actually comes back once or twice, begging for attention, and Sue turns her away. You can guess what happened to Heidi down at the pond. She drowned.

Melissa Coleman doesn't blame her mother for this in the book, but she doesn't exactly absolve her, either. After reading it I was left feeling absolutely bereft for the poor woman, whom I was unable to track down via google, hoping to learn she has found some sort of peace. And I must admit I was also left feeling a bit pissed off about Eliot Coleman's (and the Nearings') subsequent success as folk heroes.

Now of course children die. They die in car accidents in suburbia and of childhood cancers and all kinds of things. But all it takes is a short stroll through a pioneer-era graveyard to see how many children died when there was no choice for anyone but a "lifestyle" of relentless physical labour in order to put food on the table. A lot of those deaths were from childhood diseases we can now vaccinate against (if we aren't against vaccinating) but many of them were from accidents that happened when parents didn't have the time and the energy to hover over their kids.